I rather believe JFK's troubles began when he was president-elect. He surely spoke a lot with President Eisenhower, who surely complained a lot about the "military-industrial complex", and perhaps the CIA as well. If Eisenhower told him the Gary Powers U2incident was manufactured, Kennedy would have been in a "neuter the CIA, or be neutered" position.

With all the skullduggery going on behind the scenes, he might have viewed Vietnam as just another CIA trap. And his moves to pull out of Vietnam could have been the end of the patience of the CIA and the "military industrial complex".

Perhaps instead of resisting them during the Bay of Pigs, and Vietnam, and showing his hand, he should have ordered the dismantling of the CIA right after his inauguration.

Did Barack Obama actually tell intimates that he has betrayed his liberal supporters because he fears assassination?

That's the story we are getting from former-CIA-analyst-turned-Agency-critic Ray McGovern. He claims that a "close friend" attended an intimate dinner party with Barack Obama. On that occasion, the President explained why he reversed his well-known campaign promise to shut down the prison at Gitmo:

And I know from a good friend who was there when it happened, that at a small dinner with progressive supporters – after these progressive supporters were banging on Obama before the election, Why don’t you do the things we thought you stood for? Obama turned sharply and said, "Don’t you remember what happened to Martin Luther King Jr.?" That’s a quote, and that’s a very revealing quote...

Peter Dale Scott: The term “Deepstate”comes from Turkey. They invented it after the wreck of a speeding Mercedes in 1996 in which the passengers werea Member of Parliament, a beauty queen, a local senior police captain, and an important drug trafficker in Turkey who was also the head of a criminal paramilitary organization – the GreyWolves – that went around killing people. And it became very obvious in Turkey that there were a covert relationship between the police who officially were looking for this man – even though a policeman was there with him in the car – and these people who committed crimes on behalf of the state. The state that you commit crimes for is not a state that can show its hand to the people, it’s a hidden state, a covert structure. In Turkey, they called it the Deepstate, [1] and I had been talking about deep politics for a long time so I used the term in The Road to 9/11. This is why I have defined deep politics as all those political practices and arrangements, deliberate or not, which are usually repressed rather than acknowledged. So the term “Deepstate” – coming from Turkey – is not mine...

Peter Dale Scott: After almost two years of the Obama presidency, I have to conclude, regretfully, that the influence of the deepstate, or more accurately what in my new book I call the American war machine, has continued to increase, just as it has under every US president since Kennedy. A key sign is the extent to which Obama, despite his campaign rhetoric, has continued to expand the scope of secrecy in US government, and especially to punish whistle-blowers: his campaign against Wikileaks and Julian Assange, who has not been charged yet with any crime, is without precedent in US history. I suspect that Washington’s fear of publicity is related to its awareness that US war policies are increasingly at odds with reality. In Afghanistan Obama appears to have capitulated to the efforts of General Petraeus and other generals to ensure that US troops do not begin to withdraw from combat in 2011, as originally foreseen when in 2009 Obama authorized a troop increase.

Bob Woodward’s new book, Obama’s Wars, reports that during that protracted administration debate over whether to escalate in Afghanistan, CIA Director Leon Panetta advised Obama that “no Democratic president can go against military advice… So just do it. Do what they say.” Obama recently told US troops in Afghanistan that “you’re achieving your objectives, you will succeed in your mission.” This echo of earlier, fatuously optimistic statements from Petraeus explains why there were no realistic appraisal of the war’s progress inside the White House in December 2010, as was originally mandated...

With all the skullduggery going on behind the scenes, he might have viewed Vietnam as just another CIA trap. And his moves to pull out of Vietnam could have been the end of the patience of the CIA and the "military industrial complex".

Having been paying attention at the time, I remember Kennedy with his huge Vietnam maps on an easel that he used to demonstrate the "Communist" incursions into "South Vietnam" and to sell his insertion of "advisors" into the country. This all after his election as president. So, the idea that he was already suspicious of the CIA from his supposed discussions with Eisenhower, who waited until the White House door was about to hit him in the ass before saying anything in public, is BO-O-gus. He may have eventually figured out their psychopathic ways--he was not a stupid man--but it took a while for the level of their duplicity to sink in. This is not the kind of information one readily obtains from the JFK research community, where Kennedy has lately been raised to the level of sainthood, even by those who disagree with his basic policies, even some Ron Paul "libertarians" who don't seem to comprehend the major dissonance between the positions of Paul and Kennedy. Paul, for example, is in favor of letting private businesses discriminate against minorities, whereas Kennedy, even before the Civil Rights Act only enacted under Johnson, was in favor of throwing the full force of federal power at racist practices.

Kennedy may not have been a saint, but it continues to amaze me the kind of reactionaries who pretend to be concerned with his assassination while taking the side of corporations--some of Kennedy's worst enemies--against labor unions, a position echoed by folks like Ron Paul and Alex Jones, both of whom insist that we should throw the ancient divisions between right and left overboard, which, in their minds, means the left supporting the positions of the right without any reciprocity in the other direction. When folks like Paul and Jones begin supporting the right of the working man to organize and bargain collectively I will consider pretending that these divisions are no longer relevant.

I agree with the comment re: Kennedy. In my opinion, he started to turn into a statesman at around the time he caught on to CIA shenanigans and so on. He didn't enter office as some kind of hero-savant. Jim Douglass' book claims Kennedy made a 'turn for peace'. To the extent that is so, and to the extent he had to oppose his own advisors and establishment to make that turn, he was a statesman to be mourned.

Balto seems intent on turning every single thread here into an anti-Ron Paul, anti-Alex Jones rant. I'll take the opportunity to make my views known.

I am as suspicious of pure libertarianism as I am of pure progressivism. Pure libertarianism has always struck me as anarchism for well-behaved white people. I don't see how you could have a libertarian system without it turning into a nightmare as soon as a few people got together realizing they could prey on the weak. In other words, even if you waived a magic wand tomorrow and reduced human history back to a zero-state, it would all just start all over again. The strong would prey on the weak. After a while, the strong (or the strongest) would create the State. After a while, people would maybe rebel against that State and claim its machinery for themselves, maybe not. If they did so through a revolution, either it'd be a successful one -- for a while -- or it wouldn't and another elite class of the 'strong' would take over and end up preying upon the weak. Like with any other system, the libertarian utopia is one that only works if everybody is already libertarian. In other words, if they all think and act like libertarians foreswearing all permanent compacts and acquisitions of power. But this is the fantasy of every political partisan: if everybody would only be like *us*, everything would be fine.

Of course, if everybody did truly behave themselves and never attack their neighbor, there'd be no need to even call it libertarianism. You might just call it decency.

As regards Balto's pet goat, unions and collective bargaining, I don't have any abhorrence toward them. But I also don't mind admitting that unions can be just as corrupt and harmful as corporations. I think it's ironic that libertarians like a Lew Rockwell might be in favor of temporary compacts among libertarians (associations for a given purpose like fighting a fire) but then opposed to workers bargaining collectively. I find this mystifying. Same goes for their fantasy of the market perfecting all human interrelation, their hatred of FDR, etc.

As far as Alex Jones goes, Alex Jones is an American nationalist. That's pretty clear. He certainly isn't in favor of scrapping the US Constitution in favor of a better one, for example. He's also at bottom probably motivated by some of the usual predictable prejudices -- anti-immigration because deep down they're 'brown' to him and so on. He's elevated American symbols in his mind into a mythos. Ron Paul can probably be put in the same class though he is more of a crank when it comes to so-called Austrian economics. The whole of Austrian economics seems to be founded on the notion that money in the hands of the government is money robbed of the economy. This private sector/public sector distinction is a fallacy though -- it's the economic myth of 'equilibrium' dressed up in other clothes.

I don't think it shocking that people like Paul or Jones would be in favor of exposing criminality at the highest levels like with the JFK killing. They're enemies of State power. They see the State either in general (Paul) or at the moment (Jones) as a vehicle for criminality. Jones is convinced, for example, that the Gov't has been hijacked by globalists with a eugenics agenda. Anything that is evil that can be imputed to them confirms and correlates with Jones' worldview.

A human being exists as an individual and in a collective, in my view. Libertarianism would deny the latter in favor of the former. Progressivism does the opposite. Any ideology that exalts one and denies the other is just a partial, delusional worldview, in my opinion. A political system ought to allow both human dimensions to thrive and to co-exist. As an individual, I should not be oppressed. But I also have a responsibility to the whole, since everybody is in it with each other. The good of my fellow man is ultimately my own good. However, I should not have to disappear into some collectivist system either, wherein I identify with my collective label (my race, ethncity, etc.), think that more important than myself, and then be handled by a State accordingly.